Tuesday, October 2, 2012

But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.

The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

I grew up talking to the former (and now made semi-indigent) Black Panthers that hung out near the Yale Co-Op bookstore, Educated Burger, and Yorkside Pizza who my dad would buy coffee for while trying to direct to jobs he either procured for them on campus, or with his small janitorial company.

As a young ghetto nerd, I would also read the zine Cover Action Quarterly with all its tales of the Drug War, narco-terrorism, the rise of the national security state, and black ops. And of course, I have spent many an hour listening to Coast To Coast AM in its heyday when Art Bell was predicting the now/then/soon to be future back in the early 1990s.

I was groomed to love and appreciate a good conspiracy theory.

In the Age of Obama, the Right-wing media and its bloviators have moved on from the black helicopters, and a looming United Nations Army that was poised to invade the United States via improperly insured Mexican trucks, on to various varieties of birtherism, trutherism, and a "Muslim" Black American President who hates white folks and is going to put them in chains.

Conspiracy theories can thrive both on a surplus of information (look! don't you see! it is obvious! the truth is hiding in plain sight!) as well as a paucity of data points (it is there if you just look harder! they are hiding the truth from us all! the absence of evidence is evidence in and of itself!).

3. Republicans are obsessed with purging "ineligible" voters, i.e. black and brown folks, the working class and poor, young people, and others who would vote for President Obama from the roles in order to "protect" democracy in the face of the non-problem that is illegal voting. Of course, these same valiant defenders of democracy are silent about how Republican agents are engaging in voter fraud and systematic voter intimidation against Democratic voters.

Thus, my question. What is the end game here? It is clear that Romney's agents will do anything--legal, quasi-legal, illegal, and/or criminal--to deliver him the White House. It is also clear that the Right has been systematically working to subvert the legitimacy of the country's democratically elected, first, African American President.

While the Right can refrain reality for its followers and supplicants through propaganda and perception management, what will happen if the real world sees Obama being reelected in November?

They've been hammered with the idea that while these facts are
obvious for those whose eyes are open, the media is covering it all up.
Rather than a Democrat with whom people tend to connect running a good
campaign against a flawed Republican candidate, many on the far-right
will see an illegitimate president colluding with an array of perfidious
forces, both foreign and domestic, to deny them the right to finally
'take their country back.'

Obviously, there's no need to fear a massive rebellion from millions
of engraged Glenn Beck fans in their Hoverounds; rather, the danger is
that in the aftermath of such an election, a small number of dangerously
unstable anti-government extremists will take matters into their own
hands -- and even a small number can do significant damage...

That the “unskewed” polls show Romney heading towards a blow-out win
is likely to lead more disturbed people to see themselves as victims of a
dark plot to undermine America's “traditional values.” It's not the
only iteration of the alternate universe that the right has conjured up
in recent years – just ponder, for a moment, that the creator of
“Conservapedia” – a hilariously inaccurate right-wing version of
Wikipedia – has undertaken to write a distinctly conservative version of
the Bible (one in which Jesus presumably inveighs against taxes and
regulation dragging down job creators, and doesn't constantly blather
about the poor).

But while those efforts are often laughable, the unintended
consequences of offering the hard-right a Bizarro World analysis of the
2012 election may prove deadly serious if Obama pulls out a win.

Is this the goal of the Right's fabrications? If all political speech is argumentative speech, which in turn advocates for a given outcome, are the spin doctors and dream merchants on the Right intentionally ginning up some domestic violence and terrorism for Obama's next term? If so, how would such happenings advance their cause?

4 comments:

When Obama wins he's going to bestow on you an honorary "O" Knitting you "OVega"

Why don't you expose the left wing conspiracy theories. That The Corporate Oligarchy Class being more conniving than your average Tea Partier, actually anointed President Obama as their candidate long ago after he slavishly appointed the leaders of the financial banking cabal to run the financial apparatus of America. Then engineered the largest direct subsidy to the insurance industry by allowing them to write Obama Care. I'm not going to say they engineered the worse major republican candidate ever, but they certainly did nothing( at best) to inject any logic or reason into his campaign because it's important to have at lest the pretext of a "campaign" least people begin to realize that these cabals are looting the county of all it's financial resources as we speak. Or as that other conspiracy theorist Elizabeth Warren said during the DNC Convention, "The Game is Rigged", which is something the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street agrees on. The only people who don't are the democrats. They're in the land of Ronald Reagan Optimism. And when Obama is reelected, they will be singing "happy Day's Are Hear Again" loud enough to drawn out that big sucking sound of all American resources into off shore banks

If all political speech is argumentative speech, which in turn advocates for a given outcome, are the spin doctors and dream merchants on the Right intentionally ginning up some domestic violence and terrorism for Obama's next term? If so, how would such happenings advance their cause? - ChaunceyD

The vast majority of the electorate on the Right appears to be indelibly perturbed. They continue to utilize the same weathered stimuli of fear in an attempt to channel things in the direction that’s most desirable for them. The KKK domestic terrorist group utilized White sheets; voter intimidation by Whites against Blacks and other minorities at voting polls, neo-Nazis still utilize the swastika and silly Skin-heads shave their hair to induce fear, targeting certain groups of people for a specific cause, to garner certain responses and particular outcomes of political events.

To me, all of these acts are indicative and signify the waning power of Whiteness. Now, some of those on the Right are threatening violence if Obama is re-elected.

In any event, the threat of violence or terroristic acts by certain group(s) advances nothing on one hand. On the other hand, these threats merely confirm the withering potency and a glimpse of the foreseeable sunset of White supremacy.

During an election cycle things can spin out of control very quickly. Did Fast and Furious rear its ugly head again in Arizona?

The Mexican drug cartels kill another border patrol agent. The Taliban kills three American soldiers in Afghanistan. The ghost of Ambassador Stevens haunts Obama from Benghazi. And the right releases what it calls an Obama pro-Black speech from 2007.

Tips and Support Are Always Welcome

Who is Chauncey DeVega?

I have been a guest on the BBC, National Public Radio, Ring of Fire Radio, Ed Schultz, Sirius XM's Make it Plain, Joshua Holland's Alternet Radio Hour, the Thom Hartmann radio show, the Burt Cohen show, and Our Common Ground.

I have also been interviewed on the RT Network and Free Speech TV.

I am a contributing writer for Salon and Alternet.

My writing has also been featured by Newsweek, The New York Daily News, Raw Story, The Huffington Post, and the Daily Kos.

My work has also been referenced by MSNBC, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, the Associated Press, Chicago Sun-Times, Raw Story, The Washington Spectator, Media Matters, The Gothamist, Fader, XOJane, The National Memo, The Root, Detroit Free Press, San Diego Free Press, the Global Post, as well as online magazines and publications such as The Atlantic, Slate, The Week, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, Counterpunch, Truth-Out, Pacific Standard, Common Dreams, The Daily Beast, The Washington Times, The Nation, RogerEbert.com, Ebony, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Juan Williams, Herman Cain, Alex Jones, World Net Daily, Twitchy, the Free Republic, the National Review, NewsBusters, the Media Research Council, Project 21, and Weasel Zippers have made it known that they do not like me very much.